Today, I find myself reflecting on the incredible journey of the past twenty years. It's hard to believe we've been conducting programs, sessions, and trainings with organizations for so long. What strikes me most is how we've approached each and every session with our own learning goal as facilitators. We've been in a constant state of experimentation, always striving to improve our methods and tools.

We experimented with many tools and approaches from many different fields like pshychology, sociology, anthropology, business economics, biology, design etc. For me it was logic since an organization does not just exist as an orgchart, product, balance-sheet or KPI's. We collected an eclectic mix of approaches that help to build a thriving organizition.

How to make this fit for business and innovation?

I remember all the questions we've grappled with: Where in the process does each tool fit best? Which instructions are most effective? How can we empower participants to truly take ownership? What combination of tools leads to the best results? How can we achieve all this with our team in the shortest time possible? And crucially, how can I use this tooling without having to become an expert first?! For example, we use Socratic dialogue in our sessions. When I followed the formal training this approach took at least a day and that is time we often don't have... so our challenge was; How could we achieve a dialogue around the same principles in maybe 1-2 hours? The same goes for many of our tools. How can we do this shorter? How do we make this fit for business? How can we make sure people can do this with their own team? Good enough over perfect

One of our biggest realizations has been the power of iteration. We've learned that with these thought-provoking tools, it's far more effective to go through several "good enough" cycles than to aim for one perfect iteration. This approach has really transformed how we work.

Looking back, I'm amazed at how we've documented all these learnings in our manual. It's become this incredible resource, capturing years of insights and discoveries.

Retrospectives: Good, Bad, Better After every session we did a quick Good, Bad, Better reflection and update our manual. And we sticked to the manual to turn our experience and intuition into a methodology. Hence within the team we incorporated a discipline and many time we would hear the phrase 'Read (of Write) the F*cking Manual'. In a way, that manual is where it all began.